Saturday, January 17, 2009

With paintings, performances, and other creative investigations, Resident Artists Christine Sajecki and Megan Hildebrandt decode the changing dynamics of their neighborhood habitat. Dressed like a 1940’s washer woman, Hildebrandt has spent months asking residents if she can polish their marble steps, gently shocking her “audience” into reevaluating their sense of community through a simple act of generosity and humor. With a cornucopia of sweetly irreverent paintings, Hildebrandt pays tribute to long gone local personalities – from the ship captain who slept in PattersonPark at night, to the brothers who founded Haussner’s restaurant. Christine Sajecki’s encaustic paintings reflect a more poetic sensibility. Hazy buildings with wire antennas loom behind layers of beeswax, while images of Peruvian and Mexican ruins, East European alphabets, and Catholic imagery are overlaid and assembled to evoke a community where the history of place and the histories of people are interwoven, and where generations of immigrants rub shoulders every day.At the opening, Megan Hildebrandt serves up a tongue-in-cheek history lesson, via a power point stroll through Baltimore lore.